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talking to my dad about depression
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this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2025
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What book is that from?
This comes from the introduction to "Walden, or, Life in the Woods", in which the author gets fed up with modern (1840s) society and fucks off to the woods of Massachusetts for a little over 2 years. During this time he attempted to be fully self-reliant, building his residence from the ground up and eating only what he could hunt or gather. It is emblematic of the American transcendentalism movement, which emphasized connection with nature, self-reliance, and intuitive knowledge of truth. It was, in essence, the Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance of its day, if you're aware of that book.
I read it in high school and I did not think much of it at that time. I think, perhaps, it would find more fertile ground in my thoughts now, were I to revisit it. Certainly in the decades since first reading it, I've become more sympathetic to the idea of pissing off to the woods and minding my own business until I expire.
Can confirm, fucking off from society helps.
Wife and I moved from city life to a rural area with more deer than people back in 2021. In terms of well being, the peace and nature are incredible. I never want to live in a city again.
Couldn’t completely piss off to the woods since we still need groceries, doctor, mechanic, etc., but it’s been rural enough and nobody bothers us. Now I only go into town every 5 or 6 weeks for necessities and get out as quickly as I can. I’ve become something of a hermit, but happier for it.
Man, you and I have seriously different takes on Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance :)
I'm fully on board with self reliance and DIY, but that guy was constantly insufferable to his family and friends just to try to make the point :)
I was reading it and it just annoyed me so I moved over to the audiobook as I often do if I feel I have a bad take on a read, it just made it worse :)
Could very well be. Similarly to Walden, I read it for school, and did not much care for it. One of the few concrete points I remember being discussed was a comparison between a character that rides a rickety old bike, but knows how to keep it running, and the character who rides a new bike, but relies on mechanics when things do inevitably break on it. That sort of rumination on a man who can fix things being happier than a man who can't is basically the entire premise of Walden.
Furthermore, in refreshing my memory of what subjects Prisig touched upon, I see/vaguely remember his attempts to reconcile rational empiricism with intuitive understanding, which is also very Thoreau.
However, as I've said, I didn't particularly enjoy my brush with either text, and it's been 15+ years since I last looked through either. So, it's entirely possible that they are actually philosophical polar opposites and my C- in Philosophy 101 was well earned.
I didn't doubt that's where Prisig was going with it. He just made the character so uninviting, conceited, and self centered that the message itself seemed to get lost. It felt like I was watching a movie where I hated the main character.
Yes, I also really struggled with his writing style. It felt like he was layering in additional degrees of obfuscation by creating meta-characters and framing his philosophical points in the form of fictionalized conversations from this road trip he took. Like, bud, you're already talking about abstracted concepts like Platonic Good. Do we REALLY need more abstraction?
To which Prisig, author of the most (financially) successful book on philosophy in America, would say, "Evidently, yes."
At least Thoreau came by his difficult to parse writing style honestly, being a product of the 19th century and all.
That sounds romantc. If whoever said that was around today, they might see that the male loneliness epidemic is just a bunch of incel adjacents cowards crying about how society needs to sexually validate them.
Yikes
Loneliness != wanting sex.
Although I do agree that the "male loneliness epidemic" is a bit of a manufactured narrative.